Chapter 7. Advanced DirectDraw and Bitmapped Graphics

"There are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market that are just as tasty as the real thing…"

—Chris Knight, Real Genius

In this chapter I'm going to show you the guts of DirectDraw and start working on the first module of the graphics library (T3DLIB1.CPP|H), which will be the basis of all demos and games created in this book. A lot of material will be covered in this chapter, in addition to me throwing a graphics library at you that I'll write through the course of this chapter. However, I promise that everything will be reasonably simple, while still complex enough to do something cool with. Here's what this chapter will cover:

• High-color modes

• Page flipping and double buffering

• The blitter

• Clipping

• Loading bitmaps

• Color animation

• Windowed DirectX

• Getting information from DirectX